Warner, who is gay,[2] is highly influential in the fields of Early American literature, social theory, and queer theory. His first book, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America, established him as a leading scholar in Early American literature, print culture, and public sphere theory. He later became a public figure in the gay community for his book The Trouble with Normal, in which Warner contended that queer theory and the ethics of a queer life serve as critiques of existing social and economic structures, not just as critique of heterosexuality and heterosexual society. His most recent work, Publics and Counterpublics is a collection of essays on the politics of communication in advanced capitalistic societies, or Habermasianpublic sphere theory.

Warner is currently working on the history of secularism in early America, from the early eighteenth century to the Civil War, culminating with the work of Walt Whitman, a writer on whom many of his interests converge.

Warner has been a permanent fellow of Rutger University’s Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture since 2001, and was a director from 2006-2008.[1] He also sits on a number of Advisory Boards, including that of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (since 1999), the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (since 2003), and the Library of America Colonial Writing Project (since 2005).[1]

In The Trouble With Normal, Michael Warner critiques same sex marriage activism and other moves more generally by the gay rights movement toward equality in normalcy. The book is in large part a response to Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal.[4] Chapter One, “The Ethics of Sexual Shame” argues that people with deviant sexualities have been shamed, as a result of American society’s relegation of sex to the private domain, where it is not talked about.[5] It provides a list of sexual hierarchies, as well as discussion of stigma, shame, moral panics, and queer life.[6] Chapter Two, “What’s Wrong with Normal?” critiques the notion of normalcy. In this chapter, Warner looks at the arguments of Georges Canguilhem and Alfred Kinsey to discuss issues with the concept of norms and “The Normalized Movement” within gay rights activism.[7] Chapter Three, “Beyond Gay Marriage” takes the concepts from chapter two to argue against same sex marriage, and marriage as an institution that reinforces privacy and diminishes the queer counterpublic.[8] Chapter Four, “Zoning Out Sex” discusses the zoning laws put in place by New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.[9] These laws were also critiqued in the article Warner co-wrote with Lauren Berlant in 1998, titled “Sex in Public”.[10] The conclusion “The Politics of Shame and HIV Prevention”, discusses some of the health strategies of fighting HIV/AIDS, and how the cycle of shame increases the risk of spreading the disease.[11] The book, according to Kirkus Reviews, argues “persuasively” against same sex marriage.[12]

Publics and Counterpublics is a collection of essays based around the central question “what is a public?” Around half of the essays in the book have been published previously.[13] Chapter One, “Public and Private” reviews the definitions of these terms, and traces the history of debates around public and private spheres, particularly around the women’s liberation, and then the gay rights, movements.[13] Chapter Two, “Publics and Counterpublics” looks at redefining and expanding upon the term public, to introduce multiple publics.[14] The chapter then introduces the concept of counterpublics, initially termed by Nancy Fraser to mean a public that is subordinate to a dominant public.[15] Chapter Three, “Styles of Intellectual Publics” considers the style of discourse in academic work and the impact this has on the type of public it creates.[16] It suggests that Michel Foucault might have described intellectual work as a counterpublic, and discusses this possibility.[17] Chapter Four, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject” responds to Jurgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere introducing some of the concepts we now regard as queer theory.[18] As the essay was originally published in 1989, it was written before the term “queer theory” had become widely used. Chapter Five, “Sex in Public” was co-written with Lauren Berlant, and published previously in 1998.[19] “Sex in Public” serves as a case study in the struggles over the mediation of publics, and is very similar, thematically, to The Trouble With Normal.[19] Chapter Six, “Something Queer About the Nation State” discusses queer politics and activism, and its relationship to the state. Chapter Seven, “A Soliloquy ‘Lately Spoken at the African Theatre’: Race and the Public Sphere in New York City, 1821” considers an historical counterpublic and its context, and the texts that upheld it. Chapter Eight, “Whitman Drunk” critiques Walt Whitman’s work Franklin Evans and its reception in the context of temperance activism.[20]Publics and Counterpublics, argues fellow queer theorist Ken Plummer, extended the public/private debate, and contributed to the development of queer theory.[21]

Both of these major works discuss to some extent how queer straddles the public/private divide. The Trouble With Normal argues that the gay rights struggle for marriage equality is a struggle for normalcy, and privacy. This privacy, Warner argues, comes at the cost of those who do not marry, who choose to conduct themselves in public.[22]Publics and Counterpublics considers the public sphere and its shortcomings, before considering how queer both exists in, and is subordinated by, publics. Warner calls the two books “mutually illustrative”, with The Trouble With Normal critiquing the way gay rights movements have obscured queer counterpublics, one of the central concepts of Public and Counterpublics.[23]

"The Public Sphere and the Cultural Mediation of Print," in William S. Solomon and Robert W. McChesney, eds., Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U. S. Communication History (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 7–37.

"Publication and the Public Sphere," in Carol Armbruster, eds., Publishing and Readership in Revolutionary France and America, (Westport: Greenwood, 1993), pp. 167–74.

^Robinson, Paul A. (2005). Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics. University of Chicago Press. p. 93. ISBN0-226-72200-7.

^De Lauretis coined the term "queer theory" although the way in which it is used today differs from what she originally suggested by the term. See: David Halperin, "The normalizing of queer theory." Journal of Homosexuality, 45(2005):343